After two days of card-game combat in Washington, D.C., a new boy-king of the Japanese role-playing game has emerged and he is 16-year-old Andrew Estrada of Burlington.

The two-time Canadian Pokémon champ and first-ever Canuck to beat out competitors from more than 30 countries and win the invite-only world tournament last month came away from D.C. with a championship trophy, a $10,000 university scholarship and a paid trip to next year’s contest.

For fans of Pokémon, the Japanese video game turned collectible card game, there is no brighter star than Estrada. But as quickly as his name became household fare for international apostles of Pikachu and the gang, the reluctant royal started declining interviews, cancelling photo-ops.

“England’s been calling, Brazil has been calling, Spain,” said his mother, Marcy Estrada.

“This has always been his secret little life. The moment he won, people wanted to touch him, people wanted his autograph, people wanted to be with him, and it was a little too much for a 16-year-old.”

With 3,000 fans in attendance and a further 800,000 watching the matches live online on Aug. 16-17, the popularity of the Pokémon card game is a phenomenon understood by few outside the circle.

“I almost wish I could just win and get out without anyone knowing,” the elusive Estrada told the Star in a brief phone interview. “It just happened and I’m learning to deal with it, but I don’t like the attention.”

After his victory at the Washington convention centre, Estrada was assigned two personal handlers just to make sure he could get out of the building, according to his mother.

“It’s my last year of high school and I really don’t need distractions or people coming up to me, making possible accusations or making fun of me, calling it nerdy,” Estrada said. “It’s such an intellectual game.”

Competitors play head-to-head matches, usually with a deck of 60 or so cards assembled beforehand from a possible field of hundreds. Points are scored by how the various combinations of a player’s cards stack up against their opponent’s.

“It takes time and skill to know what everyone else is going to be playing and then build your deck to counter that or outspeed it,” said Morpheus Meadows, an employee at Oakville’s Comic Connection, where Estrada — once a regular — hasn’t been seen in at least a month.

From a $29 starter deck bought for his bedroom five years ago to modern YouTube superstardom, the Corpus Christi Catholic Secondary School student still keeps his cards close to his vest — even around his friends.

The aspiring astrophysicist’s mother categorized her son’s baptism into the world of the Pokémon über-elite as “just insane.”

Over four years of international competition, Marcy estimates her son has bagged about $14,000 in scholarships plus thousands more in prizes and flights to and from exotic locales like Hawaii, San Diego and Vancouver.

“When Andrew is playing, he becomes a different person,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

The realtor admitted to frequently putting her own career — and that of her husband — on hold to travel with her son to competitions far and wide, shelling out for cards and accommodations along the way.

“We put our lives into this. It’s his passion,” Marcy said. “It’s not about the money. But I’d say that maybe we’ve come out on top.”

The Pokémon World Championships is a “celebration of the global Pokémon community and embodies the Pokémon spirit of fun, friendship, and mutual respect,” said J.C. Smith, marketing director for the Japanese company’s Seattle-based subsidiary, Pokémon Company International, in a press release. “We extend well-earned congratulations to our new Pokémon World Champions. They will travel home as heroes and will inspire others to strive for greatness.”

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